The Myth of Mental Health Diagnosis | Psychology Today
Quote:
...perhaps we should take mental health diagnoses with a grain of salt. You may get one diagnosis from one clinician and find that if you go to another one, you may get a different one—or a few extra ones. Some clinicians can tend to diagnose people more often with depression, while other clinicians can diagnose people with anxiety.6
This does not mean that diagnoses are completely useless, but it does mean we should treat them less literally and understand that two clinicians may be looking at the same symptoms but seeing and naming them differently based on different contexts, which can include the clinician's own biases, differences in training, and what the client chooses to report.
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When I was in the hospital most often I got the diagnosis of depression, no matter how much I tried to tell people my main symptom was anxiety.